• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 22nd, 2023

help-circle


  • About ten years back, I had moved away from home and was living in a small town with no Internet in my apartment. The only internet connection I had was the local library.

    I remember being so surprised at the amount of viruses on those dumb computers. I wondered what the heck people were doing to them to get them in that state, and then one time I saw some dude looking up porn and just downloading whatever programs the pages he came to told him to.

    Anyway, I’m glad I have Internet in my apartment now.




  • The problem they’re addressing is that some sites they were scraping from have begun instituting measures to stop them. The site went from working beautifully to working barely at all, with most sources either loading incredibly slowly or failing to load at all. I followed the discussions a bit on their discord, and it seems like the first recommendation was for users to host their own proxies. From what I see on the site’s initial splash, that still is one of the recommendations. I’m guessing they also rolled out the browser extension as an alternate method for users who don’t want to set up a proxy, since they were getting tons of people on thsir discord complaining about it being too hard or whatever.

    But yeah, who knows if the extension is safe. The project is open source, so you can always examine it for yourself. But at that point you may as well just host your own proxy.

    Edit: looked into it a bit more; the extension’s originally proposed purpose seems to be to get around CORS restrictions on certain sources. Seems the original proposal was here: https://github.com/movie-web/movie-web/issues/581